Graffiti
Since
its appearance in ancient Rome, graffiti has come to take an honorable place
as a form of the fine arts, despite its taint of vandalism, named for the
very race that sacked Rome.
Of course, ancient graffiti served a somewhat different purpose, surely
never bearing aesthetic pretensions. The current vigorous acceptance of this
aggressively intrusive form of art provoked many explanations, chiefly
sociological. Those who believe that the arts evolve Darwinistically, that
is by the client selection, rather than by the guidance of some aesthetic
spirit, could say that graffiti is wanted as it satisfies an aesthetic need.
In the attempt to learn from the experience of history, a comparison can
easily be made of graffiti in the aesthetic background of the street of
ancient Greece, Rome, and today. The public places in Hellenistic Greece
were, as we know, cram-packed with marvels of architecture in marble, rows
of statuary in marble and bronze. The chief industry had to do with marble
carving, given its fundamental importance in building and in practice of
religion. The artistic achievement of the time was the high point in the
tradition western art. There was no need for additional public aesthetic
satisfaction.
Graffiti began, let us say, with acknowledged imprecision, in Rome, and
flourishes today as a response the idea if not the fact that the public
places are deficient in visual aesthetic satisfaction. In comparison to
ancient Greece, this is certainly true quantitatively if not qualitatively,
for example, in New York City, the blocks on Sixth Avenue between Fifty
Fifth and Fifty Eighth streets display six public sculptures, including an
art fountain and two huge bronzes of Jim Dine’s version of the Aphrodite of
Melos. A citizen in Periclean Athens in a comparable stretch could espy a
hundred statues and
multi-figure friezes.
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